Digital Critical Edition Research Articles

The Digital Critical Edition of the Works and Letters of Nietzsche

ABSTRACT This article describes the digital critical edition of the works and letters of Nietzsche published by Nietzsche Source compared with the different versions of the Colli/Montinari critical edition.

Towards a digital model to edit the different paratextuality levels within a textual tradition

In the textual tradition of a literary work, our sources (manuscripts, printed books etc.) commonly bear, together with the "main text", different kinds of "paratexts" commenting on it (including interlinear annotations, glosses, scholia, footnotes, modern scholarly introductions and commentaries, and many others). This article proposes a unified model for a document-based digital critical edition including both the main texts and the paratexts as they appear in different single sources. The problematic aspects of such an "enlarged" digital edition are discussed, including the relations between the different paratexts and the main text they refer to within each single textual source, as well as the "alignment" of different main texts and paratexts in different sources.

Current issues in making digital editions of medieval texts—or, do electronic scholarly editions have a future?

It has been more than ten years since the first digital editions began to see the light of day. This article examines the current state of and future possibilities for the digital critical edition. Despite great promise, the article argues, digital editions have not been as successful with the general scholarly community as was expected by early digital theorists. The author attributes this failure to two main problems: a lack of easy-to-use tools and a lack of support from major publishing houses. The result is that it currently remains far easier to make a print than electronic edition. This situation will not improve until the tools and distribution of electronic projects is such that any scholar with the disciplinary skills to make an edition in print can be assured he or she will have access to the tools and distribution necessary to make it in the electronic medium.